The New York Post on Tuesday released an editorial completely trashing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) for her theatrics over the so-called "concentration camps" at the southern border.
The editorial board recounted numerous rhetorical moments AOC carried out (emphasis mine):
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is horrified at what she’s seen on her visit to a holding facility for illegal immigrants — just a week after she voted against emergency funding to improve conditions at what she’d taken to calling “concentration camps.”
This after months when Democrats insisted that talk of a border crisis was just a Trump administration contrivance, and refused to even vote on its requests for funds.
AOC has a great gift for theater, as in her claim that detained women are forced to drink from toilets — which apparently refers to standard plumbing units for these facilities, which hold both a sink and toilet.
This was almost as inspired as her stunt last fall, getting photographed with tears while supposedly viewing kids held in cages — when a wider shot revealed that she was actually looking at an empty lot.
They even pointed out one tidbit that conservatives have said all along: no one forced illegal aliens to cross through the desert to come to the United States. They made they conscious decision to leave their country and come to America. That wasn't President Trump's doing. And acting like it's Trump's fault is not only morally wrong, it's factually wrong.
Yet Washington didn’t tell these migrants to travel across thousands of miles of Mexico to then cross the US border illegally. It’s the governments down in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to blame for conditions there, as El Salvador’s new president, Nayib Bukele, told the BBC on Monday.
If anyone’s encouraging them to come, it’s people out to provoke a crisis — immigration activists who think it will promote their desired reforms; drug cartels that profit from the border chaos; politicians back home, milking their own agendas.
The combination has created a wave of more than 100,000 illegal border-crossers a month, overwhelming the Border Patrol and the agencies tasked with housing, feeding and caring for the detainees.
Yet, though the migrants have been coached to claim asylum under US law, their motives are mainly economic: Undocumented immigrants from these countries have profited from time in the United States for decades, and the courts wind up denying most asylum claims.
Border Patrol agents have told us that illegal aliens are no longer coming to the United States to claim asylum. They cross the border, find the first agent they see and ask to see an immigration judge. The reason? They know about catch-and-release. They know that once they receive their court date – the very date they'll ignore – they're free to do what they please in the U.S. There's nothing that would give them the desire to show up for court, especially if there's a large possibility of being deported.
The Post summed up Ocasio-Cortez perfectly in one sentence:
AOC’s theatrics aim to play on American hearts — and distract American minds from her absurd prescriptions. At bottom, she’s just exploiting the suffering she claims to deplore.
Ocasio-Cortez has absolutely no interest in fixing our broken immigration system. You know why? Because then she wouldn't have something to be outraged about. She wouldn't have something to complain about. She wouldn't have something to blame Republicans for and she sure as hell wouldn't be able to continually slam President Trump's "lack of action."
She's great at bringing out the outrage mob. And if she's not outraged about something then she has no mob following.